Renee > Renee's Quotes

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
― Hannah Arendt

“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”
― Hannah Arendt

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think. ”
― Hannah Arendt

“Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

“The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.”
― Hannah Arendt

“Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.”
― Hannah Arendt

“When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing. ”
― Hannah Arendt

“As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.”
― Hannah Arendt

“And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.”
― Hannah Arendt

“The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.”
― Hannah Arendt

“For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil